


I See You

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: Batman - All Media Types, DC Extended Universe, Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-12 00:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17456966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: Everybody has rules. Everybody wears masks. Even knowing this, Clark thinks it's difficult to get to know Bruce.





	I See You

**Author's Note:**

> This is tangentially related to Scientific Method, and it all might end up being a series, bc god help me I have more ideas.
> 
> Hopefully this isn't too far off the mark. I've never, absolutely never, tried to write Clark before.

One of the most important factors in Clark’s ability to blend into a crowd was understanding people’s rules.

Everyone had rules. Personal little laws that dictated the appropriate response to setting and stimuli. Put people in groups, you get societies, cliques, cultures and subcultures. Groups reflected the rules and values of the people that made them up. Clark could blend into a crowd because he could figure out and embody the core values of the crowd. Failing that, he only managed to stand out as opposition to a crowd’s mentality, not alien but merely different minded.

He did this also by being sincere. He was open and accepting by nature, and that ran through him no matter what name he answered to. Clark Kent was as dutiful, as responsible, and as much a champion of justice as Superman, simply down scaled. Superman was who Clark was at his very core, taken and magnified to an inhuman extreme -- Clark Kent, a Kansas farm boy, simply could not stand out the way Superman did.

This is why Clark can’t allow himself to get too close to most people. He plays the game that it’s his own vague awkwardness that keep people from that kind of interest in him, eyes and focus sliding off him like rain from slick glass. The truth was, he wasn’t as good at masks as humans were.

Because everyone wore masks. A face for the public, a face for a night out with friends, a face for rage and grief and joy. These masks got thinner as you came closer to the person -- Ma was most herself at 5:30 in the morning, putting coffee on before she heads out to feed the chickens, because somehow that’s the moment she feels most defines her. That’s the moment she’s as much Martha Kent as she can possibly be, uninfluenced by anyone else’s wants or needs.

Clark is always that much himself.

Most people aren’t conscious of their masks. People might acknowledge having a range of _voices_ \-- their customer service voice, their baby-talk voice, their voice for phone calls or dealing with management -- but they believe they are otherwise completely consistent. They can’t sense the way their very biology changes in certain situations, pulse elevating or lowering, body temperature fluctuating, brain producing different chemicals. Perry saying ‘good job’ evokes a wholly different reaction from Lois than Clark saying it, her whole system lighting up differently, and yet Lois utterly believes herself of a single mindset, a perfectly consistent personality.

She had bristled at his musing over people and their masks when he’d brought it up in idle conversation, snapping that not _everyone_ was two-faced, as though she felt attacked. She _had_ felt attacked. Clark could smell it on her, the indignation and the subtle simmering anger. He’d wondered what her reaction would have been in a lecture hall, or had she been listening to him speak if they’d been in public and not lounging on her couch. Everyone had masks, and those masks were tied to their rules, and their rules were tied to every detail of the surrounding stimuli.

Clark had changed the subject.

Bruce is more perceptive than most anyone Clark has ever gotten to spend time with. Bruce analyzes every situation he walks into as if he believes sincerely that his very life may rely on the observation of the smallest details. Bruce knows his masks and slips them on with more purpose than most, aware of the way he glides from persona to persona. Clark thinks Bruce may even be aware or some of the overlap between masks.

It was Bruce Wayne who looked smugly into the camera when caught up by a reporter at some red carpet event, who when asked about the ‘bromance’ between him and his date (some young male celebrity in Gotham’s art world) had infamously said “it’s 2016, grow the fuck up”. But it was The Bat, and _just_ The Bat in those cool eyes, daring anyone who saw the recording to try and make something of it. Bruce Wayne, insouciant and lazy in his confidence that he could do and say anything he wanted without fear of reprisal; The Bat not just looking for but _wanting_ violence to come from the display.

Clark found Bruce almost as fascinating as Bruce seemed to find him.

Most people, if Clark was given enough time alone with them, had a moment -- maybe a only few minutes a day, sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the individual and their personal situation -- where they were the most _them_ they could be. Ma in the morning making coffee. Lois late at night, finishing an article and thinking about bed. It’s a moment where the rest of the world and its pressures on a person stopped mattering to them, where they were not even content but simply _there_. Where they could just _be._

Bruce, for all his willingness to acknowledge his masks, didn’t seem to have that sort of moment.

Bruce, aware of his masks, seemed to slip through them in a constant flow, always on enough of an edge that he couldn’t drop out of the habitual, instinctive reactions to whatever surroundings he found himself in. Even in sleep, Clark saw signs of those masks -- Wayne tossed and turned, fitful, subject to uneasy dreams that made him tense and fearful. The Bat slept like a log, scowling even as his eyes tracked the threats of his dreams, no doubt daring them to try him.

Sometimes those masks slid fully in place, and Clark had come to recognize the places where Wayne or The Bat were most present. Wayne found his peace two drinks past lunch at the office, dodging a meeting Bruce had calculated as pointless enough to skip, upholding Wayne’s reputation as a flake. The Bat, of course, was fully there and, if not at ease then at least at _home,_ in the dark, standing after a fight, body alive with pain but alight with the endorphin rush of survival.

Somewhere between Batman’s brooding sense of duty and Wayne’s wanton hedonism was Bruce. Bruce, a man who hated to ask for anything, as much afraid of acquiescence as refusal. Who believed in absolutes, who saw a problem and did whatever he could to fix it, who acted with certainty and compassion but expected no thanks, no gratitude. Bruce, who pushed those he loved most to arm’s length because he believed that nothing could come from closeness with him but misery.

Bruce, who had so much self-control he could very nearly keep his heart rate even all night, no matter what they were doing.

Bruce, who had seen all of Clark and, rather than be disgusted, or even weirded out, had seemed absolutely entranced, eager to touch, eager to _learn_. Bruce who wanted to be a good man more than anything, and was willing to let the face he showed most readily to the public be made into a parody of over-indulgent entitlement if it meant he could do good work without drawing attention to what he was really doing.

Clark understands that Bruce is… _complicated_. The more time he’s allowed to spend, the more he can see how difficult, how tangled up and _strange_ Bruce has made himself. It feels mean, thinking it this way, but perhaps there’s a reason Bruce handles Clark’s alienness so well, because compared to the other human beings Clark’s been privileged enough to spend real, intimate time with, Bruce might as well be a whole separate species himself.

He starts to see that Bruce, for all the differences between The Bat and Wayne, bleeds himself in so many ways into those dramatic people. And they into him.

Wayne is oversexed and unrestrained in taking what he wants in that arena. The Bat might as well be asexual for all the interest he shows. They are capable of this balance because in someway, they’re both reflections of Bruce.

It’s Wayne who smirks at him as he saunters across the Cave, and it’s Batman whose eyes are hot and lively with the challenge of it, but it’s Bruce, just Bruce who says gently, “Let’s go to bed,” with his hand on Clark’s arm.

And Clark thinks, well, maybe there’s something to that. Something about… degrees. Something about masks and characters and how if they’re worn too often or for too long they really just become part of that persona. He is by no means a trained psychologist or sociologist or anyone, really, qualified to assess any of this. He’s an armchair observer at the very most, but still, there’s just… something in the way Bruce meets his eyes, all those people he needs to be shining through.

Something about it where Clark can look at him and know, just for a second, that it’s _Bruce_ . Whoever he wants to be, whoever he’s trying to be, this is _Bruce_.

 _I see you_ , he thinks, and there’s a joy in that, a certain hedonistic hope, to the idea that he’s the one who can manage that, who can see who this man really is. That he’s aware not only of the masks but how to see beneath them -- and the idea, under that, that he can do this because Bruce lets him.

Because Bruce wants him to.


End file.
